V-ROX turned Vladivostok into a music capital of the Pacific. Source: Gleb Fedorov

Vladivostok is 6,500 km away from Moscow - but the flight from Japan
takes only an hour. Korea and China are even closer. Every restaurant has sushi and Chinese rice on
the menu, and street vendors sell traditional Korean hot pies. But there is
very little Asian music; the city’s airwaves are dominated by Russian pop
catering to a rather low common denominator.

Ilya Lagutenko, frontman of the
legendary Russian rock band Mumiy Troll, is determined to address that particular
problem. He has been instrumental in organizing the V-ROX festival, and he
personally invited bands from Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and even the western
seaboard of the United States to attend the event.

Goonamguayeoridingstella (Shadow Dance). Source: YouTube

He has an impressive ambition of turning
Vladivostok into a music capital of the Pacific. The plan is to help Russian bands become
better recognized in the Far Eastern countries, and vice versa.

Success of the venture is
uncertain; it may well take three or five attempts to get the ball rolling. But
Woodstock, too used to be just a small rural town before the 1969 festival.
Lagutenko hopes to turn Vladivostok into something of a Pacific Vladiwoodstock.

The secret fans of
Alice Cooper

Vladivostok is a city of
impressive musical traditions, including the underground variety. Back in the
1970s Vladivostok was always the first in the Soviet Union to get its hands on
the latest Western LP records brought by merchant fleet sailors returning from
overseas voyages.

Earlier this year the city
installed a statue of a 1980s sailor on the corner of Okeanicheskiy Boulevard
and Admiral Fokin Street. The sailor wears jeans, in line with the latest
fashion of that time, and clutches a bunch of Western LPs.

"Our stomping
ground was the Minny Compound Park," says Aleksandr Gorodniy, head of
the Art-etazh modern arts gallery. "We would often end up at the
police station because nobody liked us being there."

Alice Cooper himself was
amazed by Gorodniy’s collection entitled "A Book of Jeans" when he
was on a tour in Vladivostok. Gorodniy lovingly copied, by hand, the jackets of
hundreds of Western LPs, and collected dozens of articles about rock stars.

"Look at this,
pups," Cooper told his band. "You weren’t even born when I
already had fans in Vladivostok!"

This, then, was a 30-year
history of love for Western rock music. And then the Asians arrived.

Enough place in the
sun for everyone

The biggest star of the gig
on the central square of Vladivostok was undoubtedly Mumiy Troll itself.
Everyone in the city loves the band.

Adoration turned to ecstasy when Lagutenko
performed his famous Vladivostok-2000, which has long become the unofficial
anthem of the city.

Vladivostok 2000. Mumiy Troll. Source: YouTube

The song is a powerful
glam-rock item worthy of Marc Bolan and his T.Rex band. It gave goose bumps to
everyone present on the square – the Russians, the Americans, and the Asians as
well.

But probably the most
exciting performance of the entire festival was delivered by P.K.14, with their
rough alternative guitar music.

During the band's fourth song a pouring rain
began. The equipment was close to being inundated. People were dancing barefoot
on the square.

The frontman of Tumanny
Ston, a cult punk band from Vladivostok, a large sun-tanned guy with a lizard
pattern on his shaven head, was dancing with a cigar in his mouth, in
dripping-wet T-shirt, in huge puddles of water.

The organizers offered to
stop the concert, but Yang Haisong, frontman of the Chinese underground rock
band P.K.14, replied, "I will keep singing until the sun comes out."

And as soon as his guitar player delivered the final few strings, the sun
peeked out from behind the clouds.

A typical Californian-style
rainbow appeared over the bridge cross the Golden Horn bay, which looks
strikingly similar to San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge.

Nobody understood a word of
what Yang Haisong was singing, apart from a dozen visiting Chinese journalists.
But the sun was shining on everyone.